Section II the Colonial Realm

209 Section II The Colonial Realm Section two of the thesis extends Chartist historiography to Australia by way of a series of case studies. Chapter six looks at changing perceptions of the Australian colonies (primarily New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land and Victoria) between the first phase of Chartist activity in the mid-to-late 1830s, and the early 1850s, when the Australian goldrushes began. This transitional chapter is then followed by a discussion of the first truly radical-democratic Australian newspaper, the People's Advocate, published in Sydney, New South Wales, from late 1848 by Edward Hawksley. The final two chapters then move southwards to the new colony of Victoria, and are primarily concerned with tracing the Chartist political inheritance in a society spectacularly transformed by British emigration during the 1850s. Chapter eight looks closely at the 'red-ribbon' demonstrations mobilised at Bendigo in Central Victoria in mid-1853 against the thirty shilling monthly license fee required to engage in goldmining. The final chapter looks beyond the heyday of the alluvial goldrushes, and examines the Land Convention which sat in Melbourne in 1857, as well as other aspects of Victorian democratic culture. In sum, section two examines the vitality, limitations and evolution of a Chartist cultural inheritance in various (and quite different) Australian contexts, and also critically appraises the domestic horizons of both colonial and Chartist historiography. Chapter Six The Place of Australia in Chartist Rhetoric One theme that invariably arises in writing about the place of Australia in nineteenth- century European literature and culture generally is the ramifications of distance.' Until the advent of telegraphic communication isolation gave early European society in Australia a curiously suspended character. Coral Lansbury argued that the infant colony of New South Wales 'lived in two time periods, that of its own, and the historical past of Europe', and her point remains valid for the Chartist period.' The function of almost incomprehensible distance is certainly crucial when looking at the rhetorical contestation over Australia within Chartist political culture. Few of the Chartists who wrote, read or heard about the colonies had any physical experience of Australia. Confusion abounded as to the size, purpose and geographical relationships of the colonies. Henry Richard Nicholls recalled being accosted at his London farewell by a man who exhorted him to seek out an estranged son in Australia, as if `all the people there knew each other, and were sure to meet sooner or later'. 3 Because comparatively few Chartist emigrants (or political prisoners) actually returned to Britain, knowledge of Australia was primarily mediated in printed sources and oral lore. Australia was, for the average Chartist, a rhetorical entity. Alan Beever has argued that the place of Australia in working class opinion changed drastically during the 1840s. 'By mid century', he writes, 'Australia had become a focal point of attention, and the image was highly favourable' — and not just 1 See generally G. Blainey, The tyranny of distance (Melbourne, 1982). 2 C. Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: the evocation of Australia in nineteenth-century English literature (Melbourne, 1970), pp. 13-14. 3 Nicholls, Typescript memoir of London Chartism, p. 21. The Place of Australia in Chartist Rhetoric 211 because of the discovery of gold.' The real vision of Arcady for many, Beever emphasises, lay in the living bounty of the soil. But if we narrow the search somewhat from the 'working class' parameter of opinion Beever works with, and look more closely at the cultivation of images of Australia within Chartist political culture between the late 1830s and the early 1850s, the transformation from a Hell on earth to a 'paradise' becomes rather more difficult to discern. Whilst attitudes to emigration undeniably changed by about mid-century, the ready Chartist equation of emigration with political exile and quietism never really disappeared. Significant differences, moreover, existed between Chartist attitudes to the United States and Australia.5 Whilst the Northern Star may have embraced a favourable notion of Australia just before its demise, influential leaders such as Joseph Barker and Ernest Jones continued to paint Australia in decidedly negative terms in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The antipodean odyssey that straddled almost the entire Chartist period, of course, was the exile of the 'Welsh martyrs': John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones. The 'never to be forgotten' Frost, Williams and Jones quickly became part of Chartism's 'martyrology' after their trial, reprieve and transportation to Van Diemen's Land (aboard the Mandarin) in 1840. Although Gammage suggests that the efforts made for the pardon and return of the Newport rising leaders waned somewhat after 1844, the initial mass-mobilisation of opinion against their sentences probably saved their lives, and over the next fifteen years or so their names were solemnly invoked at 4 Beever, 'From a place of horrible destitution', p. 11. 5 For the USA see Boston, British Chartists in America, pp. 13-20. The Place of Australia in Chartist Rhetoric 212 Chartist gatherings throughout Britain. 6 In August 1840 the London Chartist H. (Henry Dowall?) Griffiths had written to the Star: I consider it highly necessary that Frost, Williams and Jones should be mentioned at every public meeting, & c.; that you should cheer them three times three, and also host the Whigs at their elections, and their Corn Law preventives of justice, at their meetings, and cry at each, 'Where's Frost?' `What have you done with the Welsh Martyrs?'' From Boulogne, Thomas Matthew informed Chartists at home that the 'working men of Moulin A Vapeur"do sincerely sympathise with the wives and families of Frost, Williams and Jones, for the worse than death-like manner in which they have been hurried away'. 8 Soon a central fund raising committee was set up in Birmingham to lobby the people's 'mock representatives' and mobilise public meetings and petitions demanding the Welsh leaders' pardon.' Organisers T.P. Green and W.H. Cotton helpfully provided potential activists with procedural advice and some ready-made resolutions.'° Enterprising Manchester Chartists also produced batches of green adhesive stickers inscribed 'Remember Frost, Williams and Jones', and a good trade was apparently met with at restoration committee meetings." In early 1846 Chartists claimed to have collected 3,000,000 signatures in three weeks demanding the restoration of the Welsh exiles, although the hundreds of petitions presented by Duncombe, Fielden and other sympathetic members were once 6 Gammage, History, p. 256. 7 Northern Star, 5 September 1840, p. 5. 8 Northern Star, 14 March 1840, p. 5. Matthew also remitted the sum of £1 12s. 6d. for Henry Vincent's defence fund. 9 See the Rules, regulations, and objects of the committee for securing the return to their native land of Messrs. Frost, Williams and Jones (Birmingham, 1840) held in HO 45/52. A detailed balance sheet of the committee's receipts and disbursements until June 1841 (totalling £42 13s. 8d.) was published in the Northern Star, 18 September 1841, p. 6. 10 Rules, regulations, and objects of the committee for securing the return to their native land of Messrs. Frost, Williams and Jones, pp. 6-7. 11 Northern Star, 30 January 1841, p. 5; 20 February 1841, p. 1; Pickering, 'Chartism and the "Trade of Agitation"', p. 225. The Place of Australia in Chartist Rhetoric 213 again ignored by most members of the Commons: 2 Later that year the Star reported that Frost was 'out of employ, in ill-health, and in indigent circumstances, at Sydney'. 13 Within a couple of months approximately £300 had been subscribed to English and Scottish support funds." Apart from these nationally co-ordinated fundraising efforts so typical of the organised movement culture, ad hoc appeals were commonly made at Chartist meetings. James Sweet concluded a Land Plan lecture at Nottingham 'by hoping that his countrymen would never forget that Frost, Williams, Jones and Ellis were yet in Exile, in a felon's land' . 15 A local subscription fund (for Williams and Jones) was immediately decided upon, and Sweet appointed treasurer.'6 Chartists also attempted to restore the domestic bonds broken by Whig tyranny. In May 1848 the National Victims' Committee appealed for £50 'to pay the passage and give an outfit' to enable William Jones' wife to emigrate to Van Diemen's Land.'' Many children were also named after the Welsh leaders (particularly Frost) in the early 1840s, and the political agency inherent in this symbolic act was duly recorded for all Chartists to see in the Star. Just after Feargus O'Connor's release from York Castle, for example, it was reported that 'Two brothers of the name of Amer, residing at Boothtown, near Halifax, have each of them a son, one of which is christened Feargus, and the other John Frose. 18 In time other 'martyrs' were appended to the counter-cultural incantation of the Welsh exiles. At a social gathering in Bradford in 1851, the Manchester activist James Leach pre-empted the dancing by remembering 12 See Northern Star, 14 March 1846, pp. 4, 6-8. Duncombe presented 249 petitions collected in England and Scotland. 13 Northern Star, 6 June 1846, p. 5. Note that Frost was in Van Diemen's Land, not Sydney. Illustration 3 is taken from Roberts and Thompson, Images of Chartism, p. 53. 14 Northern Star, 8 August 1846, p. 8; 15 August 1846, p. 2. 15 Northern Star, 29 August 1846, p. 8. For Ellis see pp. 219-22 below. 16 Northern Star, 29 August 1846, p. 8. 17 Northern Star, 27 May 1848, p. 5. 18 Northern Star, 19 September 1840, p. 8. The Place of Australia in Chartist Rhetoric 214 `Frost, Williams and Jones, Cuffay, Mitchell, O'Brien, and all banished patriots and martyrs in the cause of liberty'.

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